I begin this thread of posts on “The Apostolic Fathers in a Nutshell”  (see yesterday’s post) with the book of 1 Clement, which was almost certainly the first of these non-canonical proto-orthodox texts to be written.  I will devote several posts to 1 Clement itself: this one will provide a brief overview.

I begin with a fifty-word one-sentence summary:

1 Clement is a letter from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth that objects at length to its recent coup of leadership, urging the rival leaders to yield power back to the duly appointed original elders out of humility and  obedience, for the health of the church.  

Now a fuller exposition.  I have taken this from the Introduction to 1 Clement in my edition, The Apostolic Fathers vol. 1 (Harvard University Press, 2003)

******************************

The “First Letter of Clement” is a misnomer, as no other letter from the author survives:  “Second Clement,” which is not a letter, comes from a different hand (as I will show in my post to come on Second Clement).  Moreover, the present letter does not claim to be written by Clement, who, in fact, is never mentioned in its text.

Overview of the Letter

The letter is addressed by the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, and is written in order to deal with problems that had arisen there.  Although allusions to the situation are found already in chapter 1, its full nature is not made clear until nearly two-thirds of the way into the letter (esp. chs. 42-44, 47).  The church in Corinth had experienced a turnover in leadership, which the author of the letter considered a heinous grab for power by a group of jealous upstarts, who had deposed the ruling group of presbyters and assumed control of the church for themselves.  The letter is a strong “request … for peace and harmony” (63:2), which upbraids the Corinthian church for its disunity, convicts members of the guilty party of the error of their ways, and urges them to return the deposed presbyters to their positions of authority.

It is a very long letter for such a direct purpose, and some critics (Wrede, Knopf) have claimed that its rambling and digressive character indicate that the author forgot his original reason for writing it until near the end.  Other scholars (e.g., Lona, Bowe) have found more intricate and subtle organizing principles in the letter, and have argued that rather than simply deal with the immediate issue head-on, the author has chosen to employ standard rhetorical ploys and extensive illustrations in order to make larger points, that the church of God is to be harmonious and unified, that peace in the church is more important than personal advancement to places of leadership, and that the envy and jealousy that have led to the ecclesiastical coup need to be rooted out.

Scholars have occasionally wrangled, somewhat needlessly, over whether the rhetorical strategies of the letter are better situated in a Jewish or a Hellenistic milieu (Sanders, Beyschlag).  To be sure, the letter’s interest in and commitment to the Jewish Bible is obvious: from beginning to end the author establishes his views by citing the authority of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, used by Hellenistic Jews and Christians alike.   Examples of both exemplary and dishonorable behavior are drawn from narratives of the Old Testament from Cain and Abel onwards, including Abraham, Lot, Lot’s wife, Moses, Rahab, David, Daniel, and so on.  And biblical injunctions, commandments, and prophecies, cited at length throughout the epistle, are among its most obvious and striking features.

At the same time, the letter as a whole, along with its constituent parts, shows clear familiarity with Hellenistic rhetorical forms. In particular, the letter functions as a kind of “homonoia (= harmony) speech,” a rhetorical form common among Greek and Roman orators for urging peace and harmony in a city-state experiencing internal strife and disruption.  To some extent, then, the church is here conceptualized as a political entity, which needs to function as a harmonious unit in order to fulfill its divinely appointed mission and so do the will of the God who created it.

The notion of “order” is thus of paramount importance to the author, who not only cites Old Testament precedents to make his case (e.g., the orderly sacrifices and liturgical functions assigned to priests and Levites in Scripture, ch. 40) but also mounts a wide range of arguments to show that God is a God of harmony and order, not of factions and strife.  He appeals, for example, to nature as revelatory of God’s orderly handiwork: the sun, moon, and stars were created to function together without disrupting each other’s work, the seasons succeed one another in orderly sequence, the oceans and their tides follow divine strictures on their scope and power (ch. 20).

Moreover, those who disrupt God’s harmonious order will face punishment, if not in this age then after the resurrection, which is sure to occur, as God himself reveals through both mundane and extraordinary facts of nature — from the sequence of  night and day (the night dies, the day arises) to the death and rebirth of the phoenix in a regular 500-year cycle (chs. 24-25).

The church of Corinth, then, characterized by shameful faction, schism, and disunity is urged to restore harmony by reinstating its presbyters, submitting to their authority, and seeking peace through brotherly love, apart from all envy, jealousy, and strife.

In the next post I will deal with the intriguing question of who actually wrote this letter.  It obviously could not have an entire church (100s of authors?).  It is traditionally attributed to the church’s leader/bishop, Clement, thought to have been appointed to his post by the founder of the church in Rome, the apostle Peter.  Was 1 Clement written by the Pope?